Hump
Regular price $18.002010 John Hirsch Award for most Promising Manitoba Writer
Winner 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Poetry Prize
Finalist 2011 ReLit Award
Hump is a mash-up of pregnancy-and-mothering poems and urban/nature/love poems that functions as an anti-sentiment manifesto from Winnipeg writer Ariel Gordon. Month by month, stanza by stanza, Gordon attempts to adequately represent the wonder and devilment of being-with-child. Hump is a love poem written simultaneously to a father and child, to a lover and the glimmer in his eye, and to a city that is gritty, faded, but still greener-than-most.
Praise for Hump
Gordon channels Adrienne Rich’s dichotomy of love and frustration.—Winnipeg Free Press
Ariel Gordon’s writing allows the reader access to the essence of a place and time. Her command of language brings an importance to moments both fateful and seemingly insignificant. Her work displays a surprising combination of ease and conviction, of playfulness tempered with insight, and evokes a vivid sense of the word in its studied context, the image in its rightful place.—Jury for Hirsh Award
Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.—Robert Kroetsch
The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed.—Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry
Brimming with finely crafted poems that thrum with life and love, Hump is indeed a very promising debut.—CV2
The Junta of Happenstance
Regular price $19.95Winner 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize
Winner 2021 Governor General Literary Award for Poetry
Longlisted 2022 Gerald Lampert Award
Longlisted 2022 Raymond Souster Award
Personal, primordial, and pulsing with syncopated language, Tolu Oloruntoba’s poetic debut, The Junta of Happenstance, is a compendium of dis-ease. This includes disease in the traditional sense, as informed by the poet’s time as a physician, and dis-ease as a primer for family dysfunction, the (im)migrant experience, and urban / corporate anxiety. In the face of struggles against social injustice, Oloruntoba navigates the contemporary moment with empathy and intelligence, finding beauty in chaos, and strength in suffering. The Junta of Happenstance is an important and assured debut.
Praise for The Junta of Happenstance
Tolu Oloruntoba uses a “safecracker ear” (“Child at Sleep”) to perceive both the subtle and overt mechanics of human interactions and to explore the interlocking parts of past and present, individual and community, and the here and there.—Samantha Jones, ARC Poetry magazine
The Junta of Happenstance, Tolu Oloruntoba’s dazzling debut collection, collides the language of revolution with the landscapes of the body. These poems go beyond the desire to ward off death. They emerge out of a life intimate with death’s randomness. Like the vicissitudes of war, Oloruntoba’s poems make peace with accident and fate. They bring breath to survival. ‘If the timeline ahead is/ infinitely longer than the/ knives behind, perhaps/ as we set to mending/ we can heal more/ than we ever undid./ But we, too,/ would like a piece of the plunder.’ These exquisite poems leave an imprint both violent and terrifyingly beautiful.—Judges’ Citation, 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize
Tolu Oloruntoba’s voice in The Junta of Happenstance is at once thoughtful and authoritative, metaphorically rich and lyrically surprising. Oloruntoba’s language travels through history and myth to speak to today and engage with a future transformed by new understanding. The combination of craft and spirit cuts a fine place for this debut work, expanding our literary view.—2021 Governor General Literary Award Peer assessment committee: Kaie Kellough, George Murray and Anna Marie Sewell
Solace
Regular price $18.95The poems in the collection were written within one year when the pandemic ruled our lives by forcing us into isolation. In hope of maintaining a semblance of reality, the poet is compelled to inhabit imaginative space, focusing on specific images generated by everyday life. The poems become her companions and through writing them, she finds relief in pain and grief. The book Solace is a quest to find consolation, and to speak on behalf of people, who although overwhelmed by human limitations, search for something tangible which can restore their peace of mind in turbulent times.
At the End, Beginnings
Regular price $18.95In this first book by Christopher Lawrence Menard, the poet paints a picture of what it means to be a son, a brother, a husband and a father, even as his own father begins to succumb to the diseases he has battled for years. John B. Lee, the renowned Canadian poet, describes Menard’s tribute to family life as “a love story,” and says. “the love of life is life itself.” In this collection of poems, Menard reflects both on the man who shaped him and the man he became, as well as the boy he is helping to guide.
Word Problems
Regular price $21.95From Ian Williams, author of Reproduction, winner of the Giller Prize and a June 2020 Indie Next Great Read
Frustrated by how tough the issues of our time are to solve – racial inequality, our pernicious depression, the troubled relationships we have with other people – Ian Williams revisits the seemingly simple questions of grade school for inspiration: if Billy has five nickels and Jane has three dimes, how many Black men will be murdered by police? He finds no satisfaction, realizing that maybe there are no easy answers to ineffable questions.
Williams uses his characteristic inventiveness to find not just new answers but new questions, reconsidering what poetry can be, using math and grammar lessons to shape poems that invite us to participate. Two long poems cut through the text like vibrating bass notes, curiosities circle endlessly, and microaggressions spin into lyric. And all done with a light touch and a joyful sense of humour.
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Ian Williams is the author of the Giller Prize-winning novel Reproduction . His last poetry collection Personals was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award. His short story collection, Not Anyone's Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. His first book, You Know Who You Are, was a finalist for the ReLit Poetry Prize. Williams holds a Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto and is currently an assistant professor of poetry in the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. He was the 2014-2015 Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary's Distinguished Writers Program. Ian Williams currently resides in Vancouver, BC.
